JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL: Far more richly deserving of the moniker Eat Pray Love than Ms. Roberts’ recent travesty, writer-director Mitsuhiro Mihara’s refined, heartfelt adaptation of his own novel is a wonderfully rewarding experience. The multi-hyphenate’s intimacy with all aspects of his central character’s lives makes for a film of small, precise yet resonant moments that expose their damaged but hopeful spirits.
The key protagonists are Takako Yamashita (Miki Nakatani), a widowed single mother whom we meet as she struggles to appease her corporate bosses. They are determined that she secure the skills and recipes of Wang Qingkuo (Tatsuya Fuji), the sole proprietor and lone chef at the Little Shanghai cafe, a much-loved local establishment famous for its Chinese dishes that Wang creates from traditional ingredients from his homeland region, the village of Shaoxing in mainland China.
After Wang refuses to even meet with Takako, she decides it best she tastes the menu in its entirety so that she may fully understand the man and his creations. So revelatory is the experience, she resigns from her job and befriends the reserved older gent, whose long work days finally take their toll, putting him in hospital. Under Wang’s reluctant tutelage, Takako trains as Little Shanghai’s new chef; soon, a lovely father-daughter dynamic is evoked and Wang and Takako bond, each personality mending the emotional fractures that have tormented their adult lives.
Of all the accomplished elements in Mihara’s film, the most crucial was the casting of the leads. The handsome Tatsuya Fuji effortlessly defines the contradictions inherent to Wang’s life – the proud heritage and fierce honour of his Chinese upbringing and what it represents to his culinary work, but also the corrosive sadness of the loss of his own young family and how it has dictated his insular existence. As Takako, Miki Nakatani instantly engenders audience empathy; a beautiful (though not overtly so), dedicated mother whom life has dealt one hardship after another, the actress is a wonderful foil for Fuji’s gruff chef.
The cumulative emotional effect of the character interplay builds in impact succinctly and, to Mihara’s credit, entirely free of sentimentality. Having travelled back to Shaoxing to teach Takako of the origins of his many recipes, Wang brings a crowd of friends and well-wishers to its feet with a comment in his native dialect that Takako does not understand. A subsequent scene, in which she learns second-hand that Wang referred to her as 'my new daughter, my pride and joy", had both Takako and this reviewer deeply moved.
Flavor of Happiness is a deceptively simple film in its structure and plotting (there is nothing new about the 'redemptive teacher/student’ plotline), but it is a film that gets to the emotional centre of its characters with exquisite grace, insight and respect.
And a word to the wise – make sure you dine, and dine well, before you watch this film. Much like Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast (1987) and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night (1996), the rich metaphor that the complexity of food preparation represents is played to the hilt in Mitsuhiro Mihara’s sumptuously-staged kitchen scenes and for the under-nourished, it will be both an emotional and gastronomically-challenging two hours.
